DIS is a multimedia art magazine. DIS is a dissection of fashion and commerce which seeks to dissolve conventions, distort realities, disturb ideologies, dismember the establishment, and disrupt the dismal dissemination of fashion discourse that's been distinctly distributed in order to display the disenfranchised as disposable. All is open to discussion. There is no final word. DIS is Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl, and David Toro.

Monegraph and the Status of the Art Object A conversation between Steven Sacks, Kevin McCoy, Zoë Salditch, Adriana Ramić, Saul Ostrow, and Mike Pepi On Monday February 10, 2015, just as The Data Issue launched, Morgan Sutherland gathered six artists, writers, and entrepreneurs positioned at the intersection of the art market and the tech industry to discuss the potential of Monegraph, the fledgling platform that emerged from Rhizome’s Seven on Seven in 2014. The brainchild… [read more »]

Big Bang Data Revisited An exchange between curator Olga Subirós, scholar Lev Manovich, and Data Issue editors Marvin Jordan & Mike Pepi. “After the novel and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate — database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.” – Lev Manovich ‘The… [read more »]

Contra-Internet Zach Blas Contra-Internet engages the emerging militancies and subversions of “the Internet,” such as the global proliferation of autonomous mesh networks, encryption tactics, and darknets. Contra-Internet aims to function as a conceptual, practical, and experimental framework for refusing the neoliberal logic of “the Internet” while building alternatives to its infrastructure. Comprised of multiple series, Contra-Internet 1) critiques the Internet as both a hegemonic descriptor for digital networking and premier arena of political control, and… [read more »]

Authenticity as a ServiceNetworked Society and the Disavowal of Self-Representation Rob Horning images by Ed Fornieles 1 / 23 1. Authenticity is tautological: I am who I am because who I am is I. It can’t be postulated or spontaneously experienced but instead must be routed through social interactions that can unfold the tautology of selfhood as an experience in time, as a kind of discovery of the self that has always been there. Authenticity is… [read more »]

Lars TCF Holdhus Interview by Alexander Iadarola “More often than not,” the interview-ready TCFX bot suggests to me during one of our several communications, “art seems to indulge in the illusion of an autonomous discourse, ignoring the multiple connections between knowledge and power.” Dealing with the TCF system in any of its manifestations can be an uncomfortable experience: the more time you spend with it, the more you realize it’s directly tinkering with the processes… [read more »]

Big Diaries Thea Ballard on the Surveilled Expressions of Young Women In an October 2014 talk at the ICA in London, conceptual artist Amalia Ulman, speaking about her social media performance-project “Excellences and Perfections,” stated that—for “young women of all backgrounds”—“being watched means coming to life and being someone.” Her project trafficked in the sort of young female archetypes often comfortably dismissed as inauthentic, as evidenced by reactions to the images of various frothy,… [read more »]

Data is the New “___” Sara M. Watson on the Industrial Metaphors of Big Data Can you fathom the depths of big data? The word fathom is a measurement of depth of the ocean, but it has also come to mean the ability to understand something. Fathom comes from faethm, meaning ‘the two arms outstretched.’ It’s 6 feet or 1.8 meters measurement is based on a standard human scale. The length of rope dropped overboard is… [read more »]

Continuous Geosurveillance in the “Smart City” Rob Kitchin on the New Forms of Governance in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing With original artwork by Mark Dorf For the past couple of decades there has been a steady stream of analysis that has documented the ways in which the rollout of new digital and networked technologies have enabled increasingly pervasive and extensive forms of state and corporate surveillance. Such technologies have the capability to capture and communicate… [read more »]

What Can an Algorithm Do? Josh Scannell on the NYPD’s DAS system “The breach of the techno-civilized logic of computation and calculations could thus be argued as madness itself.” – Eyal Weizmann, The Least of All Possible Evils (16) “If plantation slavery resides at the origins of capitalism, this is because the plantation-form insistently presides over those moments in which capitalism re-originates itself, moments in which new epochs of exploitation and accumulation emerge – early… [read more »]

Weird Solidarities Karen Gregory Like victory, the terrain changes hands with each match and every half-time. It is paid in rent. – Michel Serres Whereas past generations longed to know if there is an afterlife, today we face a living hauntology in the form of our data presences. We live on not only past death, as the recent Facebook end-of-year debacles have poignantly demonstrated, but we live beyond ourselves in and through black-boxed algorithms and… [read more »]

Nick DeMarco’s Here on Earth is currently on view at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, NY through February 1st. The show is part feature film, part sculptural installation, creating an enjoyably convergent experience. DeMarco casts cut-outs of celebrities including main characters Jennifer Lopez, Paul Newman, and baby Drake into a narrative that is equal parts science fiction, government conspiracy, and family drama. The plot is enforced by a soundtrack full with foley, music, and hired voice… [read more »]